Page 33 of The Flowers of Bay C
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Snatches of conversation float through my window from outside. It’s Jodie and Violet, out for their early morning smoke. I smile wryly at their blossoming unlikely friendship, two women diametrically opposed in background and character, bonded together by tobacco and disease.
‘She’s a bit up herself, isn’t she, that Sister Harris,’ Violet is saying.
‘What, you mean like the rod up her backside?’ Jodie says. Violet rasps out a snort, and then a laugh, and then she’s cackling away and Jodie’s joining in and they sound like the three witches fromMacbethwithout the third, yet more than making up for her absence.
‘And that one too,’ Violet says, her voice lower now. ‘Up herself, a bit, I mean.’
She’s talking about me. I can picture her now, pointing up at the window surreptitiously. I try not to laugh out loud at the irony of Violet calling someone up herself.
Jodie is quiet for a few seconds. Then, ‘Nah, she’s all right, that one. Just a bit buttoned up sometimes.’
Buttoned up? I guess that’s true, really.
‘But you know, she raised that kid alone, with that bronchithingy she’s got too, and that useless dude what just naffed off and left her.’ I wonder how she knows all of that, and then remember Jake, their whispered conversations, their trips to the garden, all the time they’ve spent together in the past few days while I have been lying in drug-hazed agony. Has Jake been opening up to someone, for the first time in his life? ‘He’s a good kid too, that Jake. Bit of an annoying bugger sometimes, thinks the world revolves round him. He told me I was a millennial snowflake yesterday, like he was inventing a clever new term, said I was wittering on about the food here or something, that I should check my privilege and think about refugees. I told him he shouldstop generalising about entire generations, and he got this grump on him and said he was being ironic, that Alphas never use the word snowflake ’cause that’s for Boomers and Xers who think that anyone who doesn’t have a stiff upper lip is a let down to the nation. He’s all right, and so is she.’
There’s a moment of silence, and I can almost smell the waves of Violet’s bafflement, curling up through the window with her smoke.
Then, ‘I think I’m one of them baby boomers.’
Jodie laughs. ‘Yeah, you are. You definitely are.’
I feel a little bit of something warm in my belly at the way Jodie talks about Jake and me. It’s like the soft edges of a possibility, that maybe, after all, I could be proud of myself, and those edges make me feel a little less insignificant than before.
And then I remember what happened in the night, and I look over at Barbara, and I hate myself anew.
Marcus didn’t believe in self-pride. At least, he didn’t believe I had anything to be proud of, only him who worked hard from dawn to dusk to keep a roof over our heads. And I knew he was right.
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‘I’ve been watching you,’ Marcus says to me. ‘I can’t help but notice you’re struggling a little.’
I swipe my arm over my sweat-soaked forehead, too aware of how I must look. I’ve been watching him, too. Watching how he works his clients until they drop, all those impossibly beautiful women hanging on his every word, women who exude confidence like rays of sunshine, strutting around the gym with their perfect toned bodies in their branded lycra and ignoring me entirely.
He crouches down next to where I am sitting on the leg-curl bench. His dark eyebrows knit together, and I follow his gaze as his eyes flick over the pitiful single ten pound weight I’m using, my legs straining at their limit. Heat blossoms in my cheeks.
‘You’re cute when you blush.’
I dab at my face with my towel, as if I can hide the increasing redness, aware of the intensity of his gaze, piercing into me.
‘Seems to me you need a targeted training programme,’ he says.
I shake my head. ‘Oh, no, I can’t afford a personal trainer or anything like that. My doctor prescribed me a six-week membership, to help me get stronger, but—’
‘Who said anything about payment?’
His eyes are oceans of empathy, and I want to drown in them.
‘Little bit of work would sort you out. You could be quite pretty, you know, if you put the effort in. Good bones. And I can help you.’ He smiles at me then and I am lost.
Quite pretty.I’m certain he doesn’t mean those words in the way Keira Knightley means them inLove Actually, all fresh-faced with youth and health and stunning beauty. He means that maybe if I work out harder my skin might sag less, I’d be less sallow, perhaps.
He reaches out and chucks me on my chin, then tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. ‘Mind me asking what’s wrong?’
Honesty. Come on, Penny, it’s the only way. ‘It’s my breathing.’
‘I know something that can help a whole load with that. Come over here.’
